Search Skills - Expand Your Reach

Now that I know some new search strategies, I will search trying them on to see how it might change my results. I still need information on teacher-librarian collaboration, but this time I will try using Boolean search strings. Below is a log of my search strategy along with my results.

Topic: teacher-librarian collaboration
Database: ERIC/FirstSearch

Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3
teacher librarian collaboration
educator media specialist cooperation
instructor participation

Search string: (teacher or educator or instructor) and (librarian or media specialist) and ( collaboration or cooperation or participation)

Results: 937 records. This is much more than my initial searches.

In viewing the records, I discovered that the results include high education and I am interested in middle school, so I further narrowed my search using NOT higher education or university or college. Now, I have 632 records. I do want current information, so I'm limited my dates to 2000-2009. Now, I'm down to 241 records. I need it to support a research project, so I narrowed it to peer reviewed. Now, I have 20 records. I reviewed all 2o and found four that will help in my project:

• Codispoti, M. & Hickey, M. (2007). Teachers and librarian collaborate! Teaching about Hispanic culture. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 19(4), p. 21-24.
• Everhart, N. (2007). School library media specialists as effective school learners. Knowledge Quest, 35(4). Available http://www.ala.org/aasi/kqweb
• Hylen, J. (2005). Help students and teachers become information literate. Teacher Librarian, 32(5), p. 22.
• Mardis, M. & Hoffman, E. (2007). Collection and collaboration: Science in Michigan Middle School Media Centers. School Library Media Research, 10. Available http://www.ala.org/aasl/slmr

Next step, I will try same searches in LibraryLiterature.

Topic: teacher-librarian collaboration
Database: LibraryLiterature

Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3
teacher librarian collaboration
educator media specialist cooperation
instructor participation

Search string: (teacher or educator or instructor) and (librarian or media specialist) and ( collaboration or cooperation or participation)

Results: 442 records. I followed the same limiting factors above. First NOT higher education or university or college. This reduced the records to 354. Now I will limit years. This returned 235 records. Now I will limit by peer reviewed. I have 96 records. The nice thing about this database is that I can now search just within these results. I did not see this feature on ERIC. I searched for middle school and found 1 record: Asselin, M. (2005). Teaching information skills in the information age: An examination of trends in the middle grades. School Libraries Worldwide, 11(1), p. 17-36.

Normally, I would not narrow so much, but I have quite a bit for my research project already.